Why? Just Why?

I've been collecting posts from online to respond to... some giving me positive reactions...and some...

...seriously, for fuck's sake!!!

Let's deconstruct it a bit... bearing in mind that I don't have a lot more context,and I'll be inferring a lot of details based on patterns I've established over the years in context with my assortment of recent posts. 

I've just finished Lanterns as well, and it was a great show. I can see how someone would want to tell stories in that universe, or stories of that nature. But...

 

Any one or two of these c ould be modified to bring D&D closer into alignment with what we see in Lanterns, but we either start drifting from the core concepts of Lanterns, or we start drifting away from the core concepts of D&D. We have a tension between the diegetic source (Lanterns) and the non-diegetoic rule systems (D&D).

If I had players who were hell bet on playing D&D, but who wanted the Lanterns style of storyline, there's enough shapeshifters, non-human races and ideas that could be mutated in different ways to get something close. It wouldn't be standard D&D by a long shot, and it wouldn't be Lanterns ether but it would pull bits from both.

Idea 1.

The "Lanterns" are all paladins, with Sinestro being a fallen paladin (who now follows a deity of fear). Each paladin is a single devoted followers of the green god of willpower, this deity has diferent paladins in different regions of the world. The green lantern powers could basically be modified into paladin prayers, which can only be accessed a certain number of times before the "holy relic ring" runs out of charge and meditation needs to be done, or oaths to the gods need to be re-affirmed. So we're adapting the Lanterns concept to D&D, and twisting our superheores into something that vaguely fits the concept within the D&D paradigm. Isn't that one of the hallmarks of creativity, adaption, manipulation, transformation.

Idea 2.

Rather than Paladins, the Lanterns are all Warlocks, the array of spells they'd get would be linked to the colours and mental/emotional forces they share an affinity with, but otherwise it's be much the same as Idea 1.

Idea 3.

I'd pull in some minimalist investigative mechanisms from another game, like Gumshoe or Cthulhu Dark, pretty much ignoring everything D&D but use a d20 modern system instead. This would keep any D&D purist players content because they'd still have a lot of the game elements they know, even if we never use them.

Idea 4.

Honestly, I'd just not be using D&D. There are dozens of superhero systems that have been released over the years, and pretty much every one of them can do the job better, because that's actually what they're designed to do.

 

Of course the next thing to consider is why someone would want to run this sort of game. If they're coming at the idea from a storytelling and narrative perspective, then they've already seen the story play out. It doesn't make sense to me that they'd just want to play through the same story again. But then again, people can sit for hours watching video game playthroughs... so I guess there are people who are in to that sort of thing. It's not imaginative, but then again some people actually struggle with being imaginative, so the limited scope of immersing in a known character within a known story is a comfortable extension of themself. I could see a game working as a continuation of the story...the same characters, the same environment, but a new story moving forward with the events in the TV series serving as a jumping off point. The importance here would be understanding how the momentum of past events is going to push characters forward, and how their relationships to others and to the world will inform future decisions. 

If they're coming at it from an immersive and simulationist perspective, they'll want to ensure everything is accurate to the events as they see them. This would also be problematic when simply playing through the events of the TV show unless they were possibly playing a parallel storyline involving minor characters from the show... but that's not what the post is implying. It's implying that the characters are Lanterns, and in this way we're probably looking three characters, John Stewart, Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner (moving forward maybe Jessica Cruz). Again it works better with new stories, but is the importance fpcused on keep the world in line with the DC universe and imagining what it would be like as a Lantern in that setting, or is the importance on the stories. 

If they're coming at the story from a gamist and competitive perspective, I could only see them wanting to solve the case quicker, or constantly have fights with one another to see who had the most power... which isn't really in keeping with the emulation of genre at all.

 

So, long story short, Lanterns as a D&D game is a terrible idea, they're too far apart and there are so many games that could do it better. Lanterns as a TTRPG could certainly work, but you need to work out why your doing it beyond just putting a surface gloss on a game concept that's designed to be something else. It's always tricky converting ideas from one medium to another, as we've seen time and time again when movies try to adapt game or books to the big screen, or back in the day when we got novelisations of movies. The same applies to converting a concept from another medium to a game... sure, it's easy to just add the surface veneer, but unless we dig a little deeper and understand the underling message, it's just going to feel fake and frustrating.